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German Gov't, Free Software, and Secure E-mail
friday2k writes "There is a nice Article on Newsforge describing how the German Government moves ahead on looking into Free Software solutions for government agencies. And you need a standard, secure, email client for this." Basically, they are funding some good secure e-mail - but making sure that it works with stuff like Kmail.
The best thing I see coming out of this is the possibility of an entire governmental agency switching over to solely free software. At that point you'll have all types of employees all using free destop productivity software. Whatever word processor they use, it'll have to work well and have everything they need and want it to. Same with presentation, spreadsheet, database, etc. applications.
One thing I've heard repeatedly from various places is that there's no set of free software applications that meet the above requirements, pretty much forcing people to use windows. Once an entire agency is using free software, the government is going to have to pay for some company to create exactly what it is that they need for the desktop, and since it's open source, it'll be available to everyone. So there'll be a standard install of a standard, easy to use desktop and it'll come with all the applications a person needs to be an engineer, statistition, executive, or even just a secretary.
I see this as possibly the only way free software will get a good business desktop in the near future, and I can't wait for it to happen.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
All the more reason for Germany to be interested in encryption. The U.S. might be shoving the genie back in the bottle for normal citizens, but you can bet that the government itself will continue to use encryption.
Likewise the Germans know that they can't run their government without encryption, but they realize that they can't expect the U.S. based software industry to supply it, and they can't really trust the U.S. based software industry not to create backdoors in the software they do supply. So the Germans are doing the only sane thing. They are writing their own crypto programs.
This is why the U.S. will fail to crack down on encryption. The genie is loose, and there are too many people that want it to stay loose.
Germany bans racist speech. Therefore they do not have Free Speech as unpopular speech is not protected. Protection of unpopular speech is essential to maintaining freedom. Freedom of Speech comes from a confidence that the government is correct. The ideas can be debated and you do not need to suppress the opposition to maintain power if you are in fact correct. If a government is not confident in the rightness of its ideology then it moves to suppress dissenting speech as that could be harmful to continued power. Thus the German government fears that egalitarianism is false, that it cannot be logically defended, and that racism may make more sense than equality.
The government should ONLY be releasing software produced with public funds as Public Domain software.
My tax dollars should not be feeding anybody's political agenda.
The amount of encryption code isn't that big, and most applications link to an external encryption API anyways. Reusing someone else's wheel. For an app developer, most encryption is a big ol' black box.
No, what you might see happening if gov't starts funding OSS development is a lot of bureaucratic bullshit. 4 hour meetings, lots of status reports. A lot of schmoozing and obfuscating. Massive incompetence. Being forced to implement other people's ideas, no matter how stupid they are.
Remember that one of the things you gain when you give up money is complete control over what you may do with the software. Nobody can tell you how to write the code, and if they don't like it, they can't fire you.
You have to remember that our legislature is made up of people that raise money from business to ensure their continued existence in Congress.
Particularly at a time when the Government is taking steps to stimulate the economy it makes little sense for them to deal a further blow to software vendors. I know it sounds counterintuitive but most of the voluminous regulations on Federal Acquisition (the FAR for those who deal with it) are not focused on getting the government the best value for the money but rather are focused on meeting congressional mandates (small disadvantaged businesses, minority and women owned businesses, etc.).
I'm all for the Government using open source software. It would just be interesting to watch the Congressional opposition.
A good Joke about that is "gang und gäbe" with IT professionals: "If we (the germans) wanna take a wordwide lead in IT, we shouldn't try do so by focusing on the lousiest propritary american OS we can lay hands on."
Quite my position
OSS is cool, '133+, democratic and modern, and the density of tech savy people, due to the high education level (compred to USA) reaches critical mass well enough. Which means politians don't wanna out themselves as 'not tech savy' by not joining in the "oss is the future" policy.
I wouldn't be suprised if Europe realy takes the lead in IT tech by doing a solid amount of OSS lobbying.
BTW: IMHO, succes of Linux in Germany is also widely based on the famos SuSE Distro.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca